


Hidden Cartographies

by Quietbang



Series: Mapping Night Vale [1]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Ableism, Backstory, Canon Character of Color, Canon Queer Character of Color, Chronic Illness, Disability, Disabled Character of Color, Family Narratives, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, M/M, Myths & Legends, Queer Gen, Roman Catholicism, SCIENCE!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietbang/pseuds/Quietbang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Carlos is 12, he tries to map the species and location of all of the insects in the land around Huépac.<br/>At 14, he is mapping his own body, where sensation stops and pain begins, the twists of nerves and bone like geological formations beneath his skin.<br/>By 16, he is mapping legends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hidden Cartographies

He is a happy child.

His mother says that he was a blessing, _un regalo de Dios_ , sent to comfort her in her old age. 

She is 46 when he is born, his sisters older and with families of their own. 

 

It is his sister who notices first. Verónica is 23 and heavy with child, and watches Carlos while their mother minds the shop, and realises that his persistent limp is something more than growing pains. 

It is worse in the morning, or after naps, and his small chubby knee is swollen and hot to the touch. 

That is the first thing. 

Later there are fevers, and hands growing strange and clawed, and a tendency to fall or drop things. It is like he is old before his time, a grandfather in a toddler's body. 

He is still happy, still grins and plants sticky kisses on his mother and sisters cheeks, still sits worshipfully at the knee of his ancient grandmother and listens to her stories of demons and magic, young girls who are tricked and who trick back. 

It is better for him when it is dry, but they are on the river Sonora, and it is not uncommon for her waters to swell and flood the town, destroying some crops and watering others, giving off a noxious humidity that makes his skin dewy and causes his joints to swell to twice their normal size. 

There are some benefits to this. He is rarely punished alongside the other boys when they have done something wrong and silly, like scaring the chickens or sneaking out to explore the desert. Carlos couldn't have been involved in that, after all. He was far too small and far too slow to get up to such mischief. 

The adults, as is so often their way, tended not to realise that all this meant was that Carlos had far, far more time than the other boys to think up the schemes, and that even at 4 he was charming and handsome and had the others wrapped around his little finger.

He is happy, but still he gets worse, until his sister's husband presents him with a carved walking stick for his seventh birthday and there is talk of moving north, but his grandmother is old, maybe dying, and although there is a clinic in town, the nearest hospital is in Hermosillo. 

 

During his grandmother's last days, Carlos sits by her bed and reads to her. He is nine, now, and incredibly bright, already in the middle school and doing work far beyond his years. His teachers use his name in sentences along with the _Universidad de Sonora_ , and his teacher had to write away to the government to get him texts that were closer to his level. 

Sometimes Carlos feels like a project, like his family and his teachers have looked at him, small and so often in pain, and seized upon his cleverness as something that will not only save him but that will make the town proud. 

He knows he is lucky, has heard it often enough- his grandmother is old and deaf and cannot read or write her name, but she knows thousands of stories by heart and never forgets to remind Carlos that she stayed in Huépac, even when hundreds left in the fifties, when cousins and aunts and uncles crossed the border in search of a better life, wrote letters back which sent money and stories of working as cooks, as nannies, as cleaners and there is no shame in work, Carlos, there is no shame in doing what you have to to survive, but his abuelita never kneeled to anyone but God. 

She tells him this, she says, coughing and rasping out the sentences between cracked and peeling lips, because he is going places, he is going to make everyone so proud, and he must remember that they are going to try and make him feel small. But he is clever, so clever, and he is not to let them. There is no shame in survival.  
Carlos is maybe too young to understand, but he nods and promises anyway, swears on Our Lady, because it seems so important and because he is scared. 

 

When he is thirteen, his mother dies. It is sudden. She had been getting headaches for months, blinding ones that left her unable to think or speak or see, until one day she collapsed and she did not wake up. 

Carlos cries for days. He has been feeling better lately, can walk with only his stick and not the walker which has become his constant companion. 

Verónica has left by now, has taken her child and her husband and gone to Ajo. She is running a nursery in her front room, and tells Carlos that he's welcome to come stay with her, as long as he goes to school everyday.  
(It's possible that Carlos had stopped doing that, that he was bored stiff and silly by the level of the classwork, that he had read all of the books in the library and had been helping his mother in the shop, using all of his spare time to explore the brush and try and keep a record of all of the animals that lived in the area, including insects. It was a work-in-progress.) 

His other sisters offer too, and Ana comes to run the shop, brings her three children and no husband and tells Carlos in no uncertain terms that he must start pulling his weight. Maria tells him that he is welcome to stay with her in her apartment in Hermosillo. He has not seen her since he was a boy, since his grandmother died. He goes to visit her, admires her modern apartment, her smart red lipstick and form-fitting suits. She is a secretary at a big business, part of the new professional class of rural young men and women making their way in the new Mexico. 

On Thursdays she goes out, comes back late or not at all, her lipstick smeared and eyes bleary. 

One night, Carlos wakes up to the sound of voices. He is sleeping on the couch, and opens his eyes slightly to see the blurry outlines of another person. He is not wearing his glasses, but it is clearly a woman. 

Carlos rolls over, listening to the sounds coming from his sister's bedroom, and _wonders_. 

In the end, he goes to Ajo. He likes Maria, but he doesn't know her, not really, and even though the city is amazing, the air is thick and smoggy and makes his lungs ache. He is having more problems with them than usual, pleurisy, the doctors call it, and Carlos wonders why his body can't do anything right. 

 

He takes a bus across the border, up through dusty towns and cracked earth. The farther he gets from the river, the dryer it gets, and although he is grateful for the relief on his bones, breathing becomes harder. 

He is reading a book when it happens. One moment, absorbed in the tales of The Dragons of Eden, the next there is a horrifying screech, a sudden jerk. People scream, and it is though time slows down. Carlos sees his cane fly across the bus, spares a thought for his book. His St Christopher medal thumps against his chest. 

And he is flying. 

He hits his head, and thinks maybe he was unconscious. All around him, people are screaming, praying. It is an awful lot of noise, and he is tired, so very tired. There is a twisted piece of metal jutting out of his hip, piercing his groin. Strange, it looks like it should hurt. For a moment, Carlos wonders in a vague, distant way if perhaps he has become so accustomed to pain that he does not notice even the most acute of injuries, but that doesn't seem possible. 

It is probably shock. 

He feels his eyes sliding shut. 

Yes, definitely shock. 

He wakes in a hospital, and it takes a moment for him to realise where he is, because although the nurses surrounding him are brown, brown like him, they are speaking English, and he has a terrible moment of cognitive dissonance before he realises he must have made it to Ajo, or somewhere near. 

His English is good, but not perfect, and he struggles to understand what he is being told through the narcotic fog. 

His sister is there, and she has been crying. Her mascara is smeared, and she is speaking rapidly to one of the nurses, who is holding her hands in a gesture of comfort.  
Carlos falls back to sleep. 

He dreams. He dreams of the shadows in the room, of naked birds and giant trees, of deep dark woods unlike any he has ever known, and of vast expanses of desert exactly like he has known. If you see a snake in a path, you must not strike it, or it will complain. If you see a snake in your path, you must kill it completely. 

There are things that should not be, and things that will not be, and things that are and are not at the same time. In his dreams, he knows this. 

Even through the morphene haze, he feels the ever-present tugging at the corner of his mind, the desire to walk into the desert until he is far from anyone, and to keep going. To disappear into the land. To _know_. 

He wonders if he is dead. 

As it turns out, the accident did not kill him. Did not properly paralyse him, either, instead destroying just enough of his lumbar nerves to make walking untenable, but not enough to make it painless. 

He spends weeks in hospital, and he can read the twin worries on his sister's face. She tries not to let on, but Carlos knows she is as worried about how they are to afford this as she is that Carlos be ok. 

When they send him home, it is with a wheelchair and a list of medication scripts that will not be filled. Carlos will tough out the pain, like he always does, and he will tough out the asthma attacks and the spasms and the feeling like he can almost but not quite walk, if he could just put his mind to it. 

 

He spends the autumn of his 13th year recovering and helping with the children Verónica takes care of. Her husband works late, picks up extra work in the Home Hardware parking lot, goes from building site to building site and comes home late, stinking of sweat.  
His niece is in sixth grade by now, and so American. Her English is perfect, and she is embarrassed by her parents and especially by her crippled uncle, who is so close to her age and so completely not normal. 

Carlos tells the children the same stories his abuelita told him, tales and legends and things that are not quite either but something closer to the truth. He tells them how the parrot came to be and how a tree once told a girl that death is the payment the earth extracts for life. He tells them the stories of saints, too, the Holy Mother and San Cristobel. And he tells them facts, too, things that are far from myth, how mountains are formed, the structure of volcanoes, the types of dinosaurs that are native to the area. 

The children love him, and it makes the year easier, in a way. When he is not with the children, he is in the room he shares with his niece, tracing his fingers down his body, marking where pain stops and begins, where sensation stops and begins, if it is a gradual fade off or an abrupt jump. He marks what makes it worse and what makes it better, what the weather is like when he is stiff and sore, what he has eaten the night before. He screams into his pillow sometimes, when the pain is so bad he cannot stand it, and when the fevers come that are always accompanied by the feeling of fire in his joints. 

 

He starts school in the winter, and it is wretched. He is not the only recent immigrant in his class, not by a long shot, but he is the only orphan, and the only wheelchair user. 

He throws himself into his schoolwork, because of course he does. It is 1994, and although his English is still not perfect, his teachers can see the potential, enough to try and decipher the wretched squiggles he makes with a pencil pressed in his gnarled fingers until they gently suggest that he try and write out his assignments on the school computers instead. 

He does that and more, becoming an expert on navigating forums and Usenet newsgroups. He begins noting themes, which stories turn up in the most places, which of his abuelita's stories have analogues in China, Ireland, Peru. Which are so specific as to be completely unknown to anybody who grew up even twenty miles from where she did. 

He maps them, too. He has a knack for mapping. 

The librarian finally asks him what he is doing, checking out all the books on local myths and legends. He tells her about the map, and when she laughs at him Carlos grits his teeth, smiles, and remembers his grandmother's orders never to kneel to anyone. 

Not that he could, anyway. It's too hard on the knees. 

Here, as back home (home, home, that is all Carlos can ever think of it as, home is with his mother and the shop, the scrubland and the river and the as-yet unfinished catalogue) there is talk of university. He is clever, you see. So very clever. 

 

He gets a scholarship to UCLA, but not before his niece finds his stash of pornography and shows it to her mother. There is a teary confrontation, but nothing much comes of it. Verónica asks Carlos why he is so determined to make things harder on himself, while Carlos stares at his feet and mutters that he can't help it.  
It is not exciting, nothing close to the earth-shattering revelation Carlos had thought it would be, and he is disappointed even as he is relieved. 

They don't talk about it again, but she does stop trying to set him up with girls from church. 

His dorm room is huge; ADA compliant, it is twice the size of the normal dorms and has a washroom. The other rooms are not so accessible, however, and Carlos finds this to his detriment when he finally (finally) manages to pick up a guy. His name is Daniel, and he is beautiful, speaks English with a slight Persian accent and has a smile that lights up his whole face. 

They meet, they flirt, boy meets boy, boy invited boy back to his room, boy gets stuck in doorway, other boy has to call security to get him out, it is very embarrassing for all boys involved. 

 

Professors, it turns out, hate the ADA. Well, perhaps it's not that they hate the ADA, but that they hate paperwork, and they associate the ADA and the students it protects with loads of it. At the monthly meetings of the disabled student's association, Carlos hears horror stories of professors brushing off students needs for accommodation as 'laziness' and 'special advantages', and if he were a different man, it would be enough to scare him off from ever asking for anything.  
But Carlos will never kneel before anyone. Carlos will make his grandmother proud. 

He doesn't so much lose his faith as it slips through his fingers, the stress of exams and papers and funding, trying frantically to stay on top of his schoolwork and his job and his internship in Dr Kajiura's lab that he forgets to go to church. His maps lay abandoned in his desk drawer, and although he thinks of them whenever he has a flare-up, whenever there is a day in which he is forced to curl on his bed in a ball of agony and desperation, he leaves them be. It is time to put aside childish things. 

Daniel finds him like that, once, and in fear calls Campus Health Services. Carlos is referred to a rheumatologist and a neurologist, both covered under his student insurance plan, and for the first time since leaving Mexico he is able to find some relief for his pain.  
The drugs have side-effects, though. Prednizone feels like meth must, makes his brain bounce against the wall at a million miles an hour, Sandimmune makes his hair grow- everywhere, he shaves twice a day now- and he loses ten pounds almost immediately for lack of appetite. He rubs Diclofenac on his joints, which is effective but makes him wheeze and smell like death. Gabapentin stops the tremors and spasms, muffled the shoots of electric pain, but makes him drink like someone who has been lost in the desert with no hope of rescue. Symbicort, inhaled, twice a day, makes his mouth feel like death and gives him terrible breath. Amitriptyline at night, until it sends him into a spiralling depression from which he can see no exit and Daniel has to physically push him into the doctor's office to find an alternative. Capsaican, weirdly, applied twice a day to the areas where pain merged with numbness. Carlos was pretty sure it feels better when ingested in food, but he is not a doctor. 

Through all of it, he goes to class, mostly, and when he can't does most of his work on a heavy laptop. He sits in the back row of his biotechnology class and huddles in a blanket, and tries desperately not to fall asleep in botany.

He graduates with a degree in biochemistry, and Verónica comes to his graduation and smiles, takes pictures to send back home. (Though he doesn't think of it as home anymore, doesn't miss it, doesn't dream of things that are and are not anymore. Los Angeles isn't home either, not yet, because as much as likes to pretend otherwise he is still a creature of faith and mystery, combined with a desire to understand, and myths fair badly in the concrete jungle.) 

 

In his grad school applications, he struggled to find the right balance between lying and mentioning his disabilities, that he might not be able to come in every day. It does not go well.  
It does not go well, not until a Professor Davis, whose smooth dark skin and grizzled features mean she might be anywhere from fifty to ninety and who smells like cats, agrees to accept him as a student at Arizona State. She studies health issues in rural desert populations, has a low, deep laugh, and drinks whiskey out of a mug. 

She also makes sure that the office he shares with two other students has a desk he can actually work at, which is more than anyone else has ever done. 

She shares lab space with Professor Zhu, who is studying nerve regrowth in cephalopods, and how it might transfer to humans. When Carlos mentions that he is considering going in the same direction, she stares at him. 

"Oh, Carlos," she says, squinting slightly. "Don't tell me you're another one of them, are you? Every five years we get someone in here who was in some horrible accident or had a brother die of something or just plain lost the genetic lottery, and it feels like they're only tryin' to fix something. That's all science is to them, a key to a cure."

Carlos stares back. That had never occurred to him. 

"I don't... want a cure," he says, slowly. "A better treatment, sure, but... that's not why I'm here. I like science. I don't want to fix anyone, I just want to understand."

She nods, apparently satisfied by the answer. "Good, because it's not like there's anything wrong with being driven by something, but those cases never turn out to well when they realise that it's a lot more complicated than they had always thought and that it turns out there isn't much funding for diseases that aren't cancer anyway."

"I just want to learn," he says, and tries to smile. 

 

His first primary authorship is on an article about the health effects of industrialising agriculture in Northern Mexico. It is relatively well-received, and he begins to make a name for himself.  
Slowly, achingly slowly, he scrapes his way up the totem poll until he is no longer just a student, because he will always be a student, but now he is also a scientist. And so when Dr Zhu tells him that he has heard about a town, a hundred miles out in the desert and a hundred miles west of everywhere, where it is said that over half of the residents were born with congenital analgesia, but are somehow capable of sensing heat and cold, Carlos finally has the sway and the courage to request a grant to study them. He assembles a team, now with graduate students of his own, and they drive his adapted van out into the desert. 

It is dusk when they arrive, but there are no streetlights. The stars are bright, as they always are in the desert, but they are not normally tinged with a purple haze. 

The radio switches on of its own accord. A deep and slightly ominous voice echoes throughout the van, even after one of the graduate students tries to turn it down. 

_"A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale."_

**Author's Note:**

> This story is as true to my lived experience with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and acquired spinal injury as it is possible to be, however, my experience is not everyone's, and it is more than possible that I have fucked things up. If I have let me know. The immigrant experience is likewise true as much as it could be to the stories of my family and friends, however, I am not American, and the people who I consulted did not immigrate to the American Southwest.  
> I have been to the American Southwest. It is lovely.  
> Likewise, the references to folk tales (and ten points if you can pick out all of them, plus you get to name my next fic in this series) come from websites, books, and documentaries. I have passing familiarity with Irish and Russian Jewish tales, that being my heritage, and like Carlos, I spent a lot of my teenage years noting the similarities between stories my grandparents would tell me and the stories of other people's grandparents across the world, but nothing more than that.  
> Finally, and most vitally, I do not speak Spanish fluently, as should be apparent. I have taken pains to get everything right and not to be gratuitous, but if I got anything wrong, please do let me know.  
> Thanks for reading. If you liked it, drop me a comment below. It would make me very happy.


End file.
